Advanced power management options?

[barakuda28]

I came to Kubuntu from Win7 and at Win7 there were very refined power management settings, which made my laptop to last more than 3 hours on battery.
Now I see Kubuntu has very simple options, which leads to my laptop lasting about hour and a half. Is there a way go get more control over the power options (like CPU power settings, etc.)

[dmeyer]

Big first question which is super important for Power Management in Linux. What Graphics card do you have and which driver are you using? Do you have a Nvidia Optimus laptop (hybrid Intel-Nvidia) or just discrete Nvidia card or a Radeon card?

More often than not moving to a proprietry graphics driver or configuring Bumblebee (Linux Nvidia Optimus workaround/implementation) will more than double your battery life. So please give us some system specs.

Also Powertop is a great tool for diagnosing power usage but lets leave that till after your GFX card has been looked at.

[james147]

You may want to look into laptop-mode-tools which can help fine tune your power usage.

Note that the default cpu govener (ondemand) is much better at saving power then the powersaving govener as it lets the cpu finish its tasks and actually go to sleep sooner. Assuming the cpu isn't at 100% all the time which it shouldn't be.

[SteveRiley]

You might check my power management thread for more suggestions.